“After my father, after he died, I guess.” I stand, restless, looking in the mirror, though I don’t want to, at the features that show very little of my mother’s too-delicate bone structure. Julian is watching me in the reflection. I rub my palm over my scalp. The hair is now long enough to move with the friction.
“And the pictures?” he asks. “When did you start taking them?”
“I got the camera three years ago.” I smile down at the one possession I truly owned, bought with cash I’d earned myself. He wants to ask more, I can tell by the way his eyes are darting around, but he just nods. “It’s just a few photos, dude.” I tell him. “I don’t have a personal flock that follows me from country to country, and my dreams are normal dreams, not visions through someone else’s eyes—”
Oh, hell. My hair is only half an inch long, but every strand stands straight up. I step backward. Sit down on the bed.
“Tell me.” I rub my forearms with my palms. “Tell me how it works. With your sister.”
“We don’t know how it works.” Julian kicks a milk crate out of his way, sits down on his own bed. “We’ve studied everything. Medical journals, new-age self-help books, Freud, Jung, everything.”
“What do you see?” My voice is tight in my throat.
“I see what she dreams.”
“Through her eyes?” I ask. “Or are you in the dream beside her?”
“I see what she sees. I’m in her head.” He glances at the journal on his desk. “Or she’s in mine.”
“Can you hear her thoughts? Can you talk to each other?”
“No.” He shakes his head. He’s perched on the edge of the mattress, arms wrapped around his knees. His profile is the same as his sister’s, with thinner lips, now pressed tight.
“What about during the day, when you’re awake? Can you see through her eyes then?” When he only shakes his head, I push. “Not even like flashes? Like if you’re looking through something?”
“No. What are you getting at?” He sits up straight again. “This isn’t a joke.”
“I know. I believe you.” I look away, hold up the Nikon. “My camera. It went weird, today. Like when I looked through it, I saw stuff that wasn’t there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw stuff I shouldn’t have seen. Like things I wasn’t close enough to see.” I breathe deep, already feeling stupid for what I’m about to say. “I saw what the girls were looking at.”
“Through their eyes?”
I don’t say, no, just your sister’s. “I saw the sofa in Sonja’s house. When I was two blocks away.”
“Let me see.” He reaches for the camera.
“They didn’t show up. They didn’t save to the data stick.”
“So it was all in your head?” But when I nod, he doesn’t call me a liar. “Next time, write it down, or draw it, and document the time,” he says. His eyes are sharp on mine. “What is she doing now?”
“Jeremy.”
He makes a face. “What about Faye?”
I pick up the camera, and then put it down. “Dude, this is creepy. Like a total invasion. What if she’s in the shower or something?”
His jaw drops open. “Um. Yeah, okay, no.”
But I won’t see Faye in my camera, no matter how hard I look, I know. This is about Memory and me, and our lightning kiss.
“Is this the first time it’s happened?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
I don’t look away from his stare until he flops back on the bed, and faces the ceiling. “I wonder if it’s us, or this place?”