I was surrounded by smoke. Thick, black, ashy coils of smoke curled up the walls and around my legs.

I ran to the door of my bedroom. But the door wasn’t there. I turned and saw the fire reaching up the bureau, drawer by drawer. The curtains burst into flames. One by one, my favorite books exploded into a spookily merry blaze, like a scene from Fahrenheit 451.

I backed up, watching in disbelief.

Faintly, I could hear the wail of sirens.

My closet door swung open and my best dress began a fire dance of its own. I smelled leather cooking and knew my shoes were burning too.

I backed away and felt the doorknob against my back. It wasn’t hot. The fire wasn’t outside yet. All I had to do was turn the knob and step out to safety.

But I couldn’t move. The flames seemed to laugh at me: snap, crackle, pop, hahahahaha.

A bottle of nail polish exploded on my dresser, and I jumped and choked out a scream as a little sheet of fire raced across the top of it.

“No!” I gasped as I saw the necklace Logan had given me glow molten red and then begin to melt. “No …”

Something brushed my leg and I screamed. The smoke felt like fur clinging to my legs.

I looked down. “Tigger!” I gasped. I had to save Tigger. I bent to scoop him up and staggered. A wave of dizziness washed over me.

For a horrifying second, as the floor rushed toward me, I thought I was falling. Then I realized that I wasn’t falling — I was shrinking. In nanoseconds, I was eyeball-to-eyeball with my cat.

I stopped shrinking and put my hand against the door to steady myself. Down low, the smoke wasn’t quite as thick and I could breathe a little easier.

The door.

I looked up. Way, way up. There was no way I could reach that doorknob.

There was no way I could get out. No way things could get worse.

But they could.

Because now Tigger was looking at me strangely. His eyes had narrowed. His tail was lashing. His ears were back. He crouched lower and I realized he was about to spring. At me.

I turned to run. I heard him leap and land with a thud behind me!

I spun around and shouted, “No, Tigger!” as I kicked out at him.

He dug his claws into my ankle. Hard.

“Me-OW!” He spat.

“OW!” I cried, and sat up in time to see the ghostly shape of my cat arc through the gray light of dawn as I kicked the covers and him up into the air. Landing with the softest of thumps, he disappeared under the desk.

“Tigger,” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry! But I had such a bad dream!”

I looked around the still-unfamiliar room. Nothing was burning.

I sniffed cautiously. No smoke.

I looked down at myself. I wasn’t a shrunken person.

My dream was just another version of the nightmares I’d had so often since the fire. I’d thought they were going away.

But clearly they weren’t.

I pulled the covers around me, feeling cold and lonely and lost. “Tigger,” I called softly.

But Tigger ignored me. I wondered if cats had nightmares. Did Tigger dream about the fire? Did he wonder what had happened in his old home and why he was living in a strange new house?

In spite of myself, my mind went back to the scene of the fire. I saw us standing in a little knot beneath the apple tree in the yard — Dad, Sharon, and me, clutching Tigger. I saw the fire trucks pulling to a stop, their lights piercing the night in an eerie reflection of the flames that swirled higher and higher through the house.

I smelled the smoke. I heard Sharon sobbing and my father murmuring softly to her. I felt his hand gripping my shoulder and realized that he’d saved my life. I looked down at Tigger, who, uncatlike, wasn’t squirming in spite of the death grip I had on him. Maybe he realized that I’d saved his life.

I saw Mrs. Prezzioso in her purple bathrobe, trotting across the lawn toward us, her face alarmed and sympathetic.

And I almost did what I hadn’t been able to do for the longest time after the fire. I almost started crying.

Stop it, I told myself.

Then I thought about Logan, my ex-boyfriend. Had I done the right thing by breaking up with him? The answer was yes, but the question still wouldn’t go away. Everything reminded me of Logan: videos, walks, books, the smell of french fries, the sports channel on television, my father’s voice reading the baseball box scores aloud from the newspaper in the mornings to Sharon and me …

My cat.

When I broke up with Logan, I thought I’d get my life back. But it seemed as if my life had become just one more thing I’d lost. Everything that had helped define me was gone.

Life was not working out the way I had planned. I seemed to be rattling around in all the space I’d gotten when I’d split with Logan. I wasn’t the all-new, totally confident, self-assured Mary Anne I had expected to be, the Mary Anne who wasn’t described in terms of other people: Mary Anne Spier, daughter of Richard Spier, stepdaughter of Sharon Schafer Spier, stepsister of Jeff Schafer, and stepsister and best friend of Dawn Schafer, who lived in California. I was still all that, as well as the Mary Anne who was a resident of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, student at Stoneybrook Middle School, secretary of the Baby-sitters Club, ex-girlfriend of Logan, best friend of Kristy Thomas, good friend of Claudia Kishi and Stacey McGill and Abby Stevenson. But I still didn’t know who I was.

It was as if I had become the tiny little person in my nightmare — the incredible shrinking Mary Anne.