As she had in the morning, Susan pressed her forehead to the glass. This time it was warm — soft as wax left in the sun.
She pulled back, startled, then cautiously leaned in again.
The window dissolved.
Susan pitched forward with a gasp. The others toppled on either side of her, Max hiccupping with surprise, Nell grabbing her blanket as it unrolled and released her into open air, Kate and Jean letting the sleek pink Barbies fly from their hands into the dusky sky.
Susan landed on all fours in the grass beneath the tree, and it was summer grass, thick with the smell of growing and damp with the settling night. Across a wide expanse, she could see the dark edge of a forest.
Her brain seemed to stutter in her head, and for a moment it was emptied of words.
Nell didn’t have that problem.
“This is an optical illusion?” she gasped, sitting up and brushing grass from her hands. “Remind me what optical means again?”
Max didn’t answer. He just gawked.
“Wow,” Kate said, looking around. “How did we do that?”
Just in front of Susan, Jean rolled to her feet and stood up.
“Our window’s still there!”
Susan turned to look as Jean scooted over to collect her Barbie. Soon they were all standing, squinting upward.
Above them, Nell’s blanket hung from a rectangle of light, a cloth waterfall tumbling from a boxy sun.
“Come on!” Nell said. “We can climb!”
Words flooded back into Susan’s head, the primary one being home. By the light of the window, she saw Max look with interest at the strange landscape around them, and a fresh surge of panic brought her voice back.
“Come on, Max! We’ve got to get back up there!”
He hesitated, then glanced at the little girls and nodded. Nell had already grabbed the bottom of the blanket, and now Max did, too, putting out a foot to brace himself against the wall that must be there. But there was no wall, and after a moment, no window, either, because with a sharp pop, the blanket came loose, fluttering down upon them. The light blinked out.
The window was gone.
Nell might look something like an elf, but nobody could accuse her of sounding like one. Susan often complained that standing next to Nell when she yelled felt like being blasted by a train whistle, or a rocket launch. She was grateful for it now, though, when Nell opened her mouth and started hollering for Mom and Dad. Nobody within a block’s distance could fail to hear Nell when she really tried.
“MOM! DAD! COME TO THE WINDOW!”
Nell paused, and they all waited. No response.
Everyone joined in for the second round, screaming themselves hoarse. Susan thought that if Mrs. Grady hadn’t had apoplexy when her kitchen disappeared, she’d definitely be calling the police now.
But not even an echo answered them. Their calls died on the wind of the strange, empty field, lost in the border of the distant wood.
Finally, they collapsed beneath the tree, stunned into silence.
Darkness had truly fallen by then. It was not the darkness Susan knew, pocked with streetlights and friendly, bright-eyed houses, sliced through with the headlights of moving cars and the occasional taillights of an airplane overhead. This was a tar-black curtain, mottled by the blotted shapes of the far-off wood.
Above, stars glittered like crushed glass.
“There are so many of them!” Kate said. “Are there always so many?”
Susan had never seen such a sky. She searched for the Three Sisters, the line of stars that sat in Orion’s Belt, but she could not make out a single familiar constellation.
“They look different because there aren’t any city lights. Those hide most stars,” Max said. “It’s called light pollution.” This last he added only faintly. His voice dribbled to nothing beneath the shock of that strange sky. In the tree, crickets chirped sleepily.
“It’s so different,” Susan said. “Maybe you’re right — maybe we can’t see the ones we know because there are too many.”
Max was breathing at least twice his normal speed. “No,” he murmured back. “That’s not it. The sky’s all wrong. Just like the ground is. Where are we?”
A small hand prodded Susan’s. She squeezed it. Kate.
Susan’s eyes began to adjust, and she could see the shape of Nell, a foot or so away. It looked strangely humped and bulky until she realized that Nell had retrieved her blanket from the ground and wrapped it around her shoulders despite the warmth of the night.
“This has to be a dream,” Nell said. “But it doesn’t feel like one. Does it?”
“Is it usually this dark in dreams?” Jean asked. Her voice came from next to Max.
“Maybe we’re drugged, or sprayed with some gas that makes you see things. They can do that, you know,” Max said.
“They?” Susan asked. She could feel the damp in the grass soaking through her sneakers. “Who’s they?”
Max sighed. “I don’t know. But if this is real, we just fell out of our house into summer.”
None of them said anything for a long minute.
“Ouch!” Max yelped. “Jean! Did you just pinch me?”
“Maybe.”
“You did! You pinched me!”
Jean’s voice was a little smaller than usual. “I thought you can’t get hurt in dreams.”
“Where do you get this stuff, Jean? Of course you can get hurt in dreams! You might be lying on the corner of a book or something. Your brain would make up a story where you got pinched, when really you’ve got a hardback jabbing you!”
“So maybe you’re just lying on a book, then.”
Max growled in exasperation, and Susan saw him lean over in the dark and pull a strand of grass, then put it to his mouth.
“I don’t know. Can you taste in dreams? I can’t remember.”
Susan knew she’d never had a dream as vivid as this. She could smell the dusty aroma of tree bark and hear the faint hum of crickets.
“What should we do?” Kate wanted to know. “If we’re dreaming, I want to wake up and go home.”
She squeezed Susan’s hand, and Susan squeezed back.
“Me, too,” Nell said. She
