and my head hit the wheel and everything got real fuzzy for a while.”
I stared. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
Artie paused, expression growing grave. “And then I woke up, and you were standing outside the car. But you were inside the car, too, all slumped over against your seatbelt, not moving, and I realized there were two of you. I thought I had a concussion or something? Only seeing double usually isn’t that literal.”
“Artie . . .” I whispered.
“I know.” He sounded utterly resigned. “I mean, I know now. At the time, though, I couldn’t understand what was happening. Not until she touched me. When you’re inside my head, it usually feels like . . . like a sunbeam in October. It’s warm and it’s welcome and I want it around as long as it wants to be there. This lady, though. Her mind felt like sticking my hand into clear water and hitting a layer of slime I didn’t know about. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t fight, and she was inside me. It was awful. And then I was asleep, and it didn’t matter anymore.”
The other cuckoo. She’d followed me somehow, and she’d arranged the accident, and it was her fault that Artie wouldn’t wake up. I should have been relieved to know that he wasn’t injured beyond our capability to fix. Instead, I was livid. She had no right to chase me. She had no right to endanger the people I cared about, and she absolutely had no right—no right at all—to do things to Artie’s head without his consent.
“I hate cuckoos,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “I’m in your head because you won’t wake up. There’s nothing so physically wrong with you that you should be in a coma, but I’m afraid you’re going to wind up in one if we don’t do something. Do you trust me?”
Artie stared at me. “What kind of a question is that?”
“You’re mad at me. You’re mad at me for going away, and I’m not going to say that isn’t fair, but it means maybe you don’t trust me right now.”
“You’re literally inside my head. Can’t you see that I trust you?” Artie shook his head. Or the idea of his head. Mindscapes are weird. “Of course I trust you. You’re my best friend. I’ve always trusted you, even when you were a jerk and shut me out.”
“Right now, I’m in your head, and this is deeper than I usually go, but it’s still surface level,” I said. “That’s why you’re ‘talking’ to me. This is all your brain trying to make sense of someone being where people really don’t belong. You’re already inside your body, so why do you have a body? Why do I have a body?”
“Because it’s more comfortable to talk to people when they have bodies?” ventured Artie.
I nodded. “Exactly. This is sort of a hallucination, but the good kind, like seeing your hand when you’re in a totally dark cave. Your brain is protecting itself by giving you a reasonable framework for an unreasonable experience.”
Artie frowned. It was sort of neat, seeing the muscles move and actually understanding what the expression was supposed to mean. “Meaning you want to do something my brain is going to think of as even more unreasonable, huh?”
“Yeah. I do.” I took a step closer to him. “The woman who looked like me—she was a cuckoo. The bad kind, not like me or Mom.”
“I picked up on that,” he said, sounding resigned. “She whammied my head, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I repeated. “She must have followed me from the airport. Whatever she did, it’s not here, at the surface level. That would be too easy for me to find and untangle. It’s somewhere deeper inside your mind, where I don’t usually go. I need your permission to go down and find it, even though I may see some things you don’t want me to see. If you’re okay with that, I think I can wake you up.”
“What if I’m not okay with it?” There was a brittle bravado to Artie’s words that took me a second to recognize.
He was scared. Of me.
Sometimes I’m glad I don’t have a heart. It means it can’t be broken. “If you’re not okay with it, I can step out of your mind, tell everyone that I can’t get consent for treatment, and call Mom. Maybe you’d be okay with her seeing your secrets.”
To my surprise, he shook his head and stepped closer