It’s been a shit year for Derek, and it’s been a good year for me. That sucks.

I’m enjoying my first car, my grades are good, and I’m even getting into rock climbing. At least, I went twice this spring. Derek stays in his room 90% of the time. You can feel tension around him and his family, even just walking past their house.

Nobody admits it, but we all want to make our best friends jealous sometimes. It just stops feeling good when you clearly have every advantage. In the seven years we’ve been friends, Derek and I have always been on basically the same level. In weirdly specific ways, too. Our moms are both chain smokers and birders. Our dads are both bad at keeping jobs. We’re both trying (trying) to learn how to code. There are some reasons why I might be the jealous one. He’s better at sports and gets a new phone basically every year, but he’s not annoying about it.

Things went downhill fast for him after his brother Miles died, back in February, the middle of our junior year of high school. Derek didn’t drop out, but he was absent more often than not. I don’t know if he passed any classes. It was a bad, bad time. But the really weird stuff began after school had ended.

In June, Derek was hired to dig up all the rocks around these 14 condos on the road toward the water treatment ponds. They’d never had lawns, just yards full of dirt, weeds, and an absolute shit ton of rocks. Now, the property owner, Melinda, wanted to lay turf. She was friends with Derek’s mom, and Derek’s mom asked me to take the job too, to keep Derek company, keep him in good spirits and his mind on positive stuff. And to be his ride. It seemed like a good idea. I needed a summer job, and I’m great at distracting people. I can go on and on about basketball, the “Fast and Furious” saga, even politics or philosophy, as long as the person I’m with isn’t too smart. Derek will stand there and listen. At least, he’ll respond as though he’s listening. I don’t test him on it.

He’s one of these people who’ll keep quiet all day, then suddenly blurt something that makes everyone crack up. He can do spot-on impressions of Hank Hill and Emperor Palpatine. But before, when he was quiet, he still seemed at ease, just lost in thought. The difference now is that he looks more like he’s trapped in thoughts than lost. He clenches his jaw and paces around.

The first time we talked about his hallucinations was our first Friday on the job.

We’d been working on the second front yard for about five hours. I had just dumped my third wheelbarrow load of rocks in a pile at the side of the road, and Derek was busy with his shovel. Busy isn’t the right word. He was wandering around a corner on his half of the yard, poking at the ground occasionally. He’d already removed practically every pebble from that corner, and now he was doing that slump-shouldered, zoned-out thing he does these days. I wasn’t too worried, but this was why his mom wanted me here. To keep him from getting too far lost (or trapped) in his own head.

I threw the wheelbarrow down on the rock pile and said, “Break time!” He jumped at the sound, then we both went to my truck and grabbed our lunches from the cooler. We ate on the condo’s side porch in the shade of some aspens. I chewed my roast beef and swiss with my mouth open, breathing heavily, more winded than you’d think. Non-stop digging and wheelbarrowing is a serious workout. And these were big rocks. I wiped sweat off my forehead with a dirty hand. Derek didn’t make any noise as he ate. He hadn’t been exerting himself as much. He’d worked hard the first two days, so I could tell something extra was weighing on him.

When I’d finished my sandwich, I cawed like a bird. The kind you hear in old west movies when someone’s stranded in the desert. It was something he and I did on apocalyptically hot days like this.

“For real,” he said.

“Your ears are way red. Did you put on sunscreen?”

He gave a small laugh, but didn’t respond.

“Did you hear me?”

“Uh huh.”

“McKayla tagged you in her Instagram story,” I said. “Looks like she misses you.” She was this religious girl at school who’d had a crush on Derek. Pretty hot despite kind of having a mustache.

“I saw that,” he said, and then, “Hey, you want to know something freaky that I don’t usually tell people?”

That question should have made me nervous, but he sounded casual, like he was about to tell me about a birthmark on his thigh or something. And I was just glad to see him talking a bit. I responded with an eyebrow raise. It was supposed to mean “Duh, I want to know,” but I think he read it as something else. He hesitated before saying more.

“What?” I said.

“I have hallucinations.”

That raised the hairs on my neck. I don’t judge people for that kind of thing. Mental illness or whatever, but it was not what I expected.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I sometimes hear people talking when I’m alone, and I see people that I recognize in places where they shouldn’t be. Like, back when I first moved here, I saw people from my old elementary school in the cafeteria.”

“Whoa.”

“It happens when I’m really stressed. It mostly stopped after freshman year, and I thought I’d grown out of it, until it happened again a few days ago.” He brushed crumbles of dirt out of his hair, “I was sitting on my couch, dicking around on my phone, and I felt somebody walk up behind me. So I turned around, and you were there.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I almost said, ‘nothing,’ before realizing that you couldn’t actually be there, because it was like 10:00 PM and you hadn’t texted or called or knocked on the door. Then I blinked, and you were gone.”

“Was it scary?” I asked. “Did I look weird?”

It probably wasn’t the right kind of question to ask.

He shrugged. “No. You just looked like you. It’s sometimes scary, but mostly frustrating. Confusing.”

“Have you told anybody?”

“My doctor. Not my parents. It’s not a huge deal. But I guess it makes sense for it to start again now, considering everything.”

I felt a twinge in my gut. Everything referred to Miles, to the accident, and all it had done to Derek that I still couldn’t possibly understand.

“That’s crazy,” I said.

I know you’re not supposed to say “crazy,” but he’s not easily offended. I kept my mouth shut then. Didn’t want to grill him, and I definitely would if we kept talking about it. Would he have to take some kind of medication for the hallucinations? Was it possible for him to hallucinate anybody? Did he see Miles? If he did, was Miles… intact?

“Sorry if this is weird,” he said, “I just felt like I should tell you.”

“I’m glad you did,” I replied, hoping he’d seem more relaxed now that this—confession?—was off his chest. I tried to engage him in conversation about all the drama he’d missed in school that spring. But he kept that same glazed look and only sort of responded to me for the rest of the day.

The weekend came. On Sunday evening, I was home watching a plate of buffalo nuggets turn in the microwave, when a memory came into my head.

Okay, here’s the thing. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t a normal memory. It was like remembering something you saw on TV once, not something you were really present for. Like déjà vu, except that with déjà vu, you eventually realize that the thing you’re remembering never actually happened.

I was standing in my kitchen, and out of nowhere, I remembered standing in Derek’s living room, behind the big sectional sofa where we’d spent hours—days, honestly—playing Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim. I could still see the microwave, but in my mind’s eye, I saw Derek’s living room. It was all blurry. Derek was sitting on the couch, hunched over with his face practically touching his phone, like he was trying to see something tiny, or trying to keep others from seeing the screen. It might have been porn. I really hope it wasn’t. I could tell the windows were dark. It was nighttime.

He suddenly turned around to see me. His face wasn’t super clear in my mind’s eye, but my brain filled in the missing details. And I heard (or remembered hearing) the words “What are you doing?” in my own voice. I stressed what and doing.

And that was it. I blinked, and I was still in my kitchen, the microwave beeping, its glass fogging up with buffalo nugget steam.

I tried to remember when this had happened in real life, what had happened before and after, and I could not. I hadn’t recently snuck up behind Derek’s couch. Not that I could remember.

But I did remember the hallucination he’d described to me.

As far as I could tell, I had just remembered his hallucination as though I’d actually been there.

Derek’s parents got him the rock-digging job as a way to keep him busy, focused and involved in something physical, since he really doesn’t have a lot to do this summer, especially now that he isn’t driving. Legally, he could drive. Everyone knows the accident wasn’t his fault. His car didn’t have four-wheel drive, and the tires slipped on the ice. It could’ve happened to anybody, but he still won’t get in a car these days.

He broke his wrist in the accident, got some scrapes and a concussion, but nothing serious. Miles, who’d been in the passenger seat, broke his neck and died.

I’d only met Miles once or twice. He was ten years older than Derek, but they’d been close anyway. Derek talked about him enough for me to have a good idea of who he was—biology teacher, reptile enthusiast, pothead, “so chill he’s more of a sloth than a human,” in Derek’s words.

Like I said, Derek had missed school most days after Miles died, and he hardly left his house for months, but I still saw him as often as I could. When summer came around, he’d probably put on 20 pounds (noticeable on a lanky guy like him) and he looked so white his skin was practically see-through. He was definitely in need of some outdoor activity.

Anyway, I thought I was totally up to the task of keeping him out of his own head, but I was not prepared for the hallucination-memory thing that happened that Sunday evening after the first week. When we were back at work at the condos the next day, I felt completely off my game, and I struggled to think of stuff to talk about. I stared at the wheelbarrow for long periods of time without actually putting any rocks in it. It didn’t help that it was 98 degrees out.