He sees things that aren't there. He feels things that aren't real. He knows things that aren't true.

Sometimes, they're harmless. The wooden doll his birth parents left to him has a different face in the moonlight. He can reach out with his mind and feel people's souls inside them. When he's alone in his room, after the long slog home from after-school language classes or wrestling, he can sit and flip a coin a hundred times and have them all come up heads, and he knows that he's making it land that way.

It was explained to him very gently, around the age when everyone was getting clearer on the difference between pretend and not pretend, and things that had been harmless and cute became grounds to avoid him on the playground or call his parents, that sometimes his brain tries to trick him. That some things aren't possible, no matter what he sees or hears or feels, and that he has to be very careful to check if something is real or made up.

He wasn't always very good at it. Most of his elementary school class learned to avoid him before long. He was very much alone, until Dorothy transferred in.

Dorothy Ueda was a legend of the third grade — strongest speller, fastest runner, hardest hitter. (Her parents also got frequent phone calls.) She wore her hair in a high, tight ponytail, and after Aiden Rossa pulled it the first time at lunch and went home crying and bloody-nosed, nobody tried it again. They sat together in reading group, and discovered that they shared a bus stop, and by the end of the year they were inseparable. He learned to ask her, when something only might be real, and she would always tell him.

It was the next year that the things he saw started getting less harmless. It started small — little skittering things just outside his vision, in neon colors or pitch black, that vanished or turned out to be much more ordinary bugs when he smacked them. But sometimes he would look out the window and see something moving through the trees, or loping down the road, twisted shapes that looked like stray cats or wandering coyotes or pedestrians until he looked long enough, and for a minute he saw too many legs or too many joints or a drooling, gaping mouth too large for the body. He knew they weren't real, but his parents still had to come to him at night sometimes and hold him while he screamed.

Dorothy believed in science, not monsters. She knew they weren't real, and she told him so. 

But she also made a blood pact with him, in the woods behind his house, that if they were real (they weren't) they would go down fighting together. And neither of them cried even a little.

Over the next few years, his family called animal control more and more often. The thing he saw ramming at their door with a head covered in bulging, oozing eyes and a bloated, hairless body turned out to be a bear. The ones studded with deep red scales with two toothy, snapping mouths were coyotes. His parents talked about moving further into the city, and set up elaborate multi-part deterrence systems to keep animals away from the house. He was banned from so much as walking home from the bus stop alone.

And he...got used to it. You can get used to anything. He got used to looking out the window, and seeing a swarm of glowing, thumb-sized insects or a tentacled horror dragging itself down the street, and looking back down at his book. Sometimes the house would shake — sometimes he'd hear screaming, or howling. Sometimes he'd see a face at his window, and then see it burst into flame, feel the heat on his cheek through the glass. It never meant anything.

When something leapt at him in the hall one day in middle school, as he made his way from after-school Chinese club to the parking lot, he was startled, but not really scared. He tore it off himself and stomped it more out of reflex than anything else, and then walked the rest of the way embarrassed that someone might have seen.

It was only when Dorothy met him there that he discovered the wound he had been ignoring, the one dripping blood down his abdomen and onto the pavement, was real.

When he came home that day, his parents had a letter to give him, sealed with wax and written in Japanese, and the boundaries of 'might be real' changed very, very quickly.

Dorothy has been staying over every night she can, these last few weeks. She's been falling asleep sitting up, waiting by his bed with a bat in her hands. Because a pact is a pact.

He hopes they'll leave her alone, tonight, once he's gone.

She makes him promise to come back alive. He's not sure she knows from what, even now.

(He's not sure that he does, either.)