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metropolises with floating buildings, exotic villages with gilded minarets, old-fashioned hamlets with leaning three-story half-timber buildings. You had to look hard to see any people in them, but they were there, silhouetted in windows, obscured in shadows, living out their tiny lives. Her school notebooks and binders, and at one point even her jeans, were covered in these sketches, and more than once, she’d lost an entire class period to daydreaming about what it would be like to live in one of those places, to be somewhere else living in some other body.
    Her mother had tried to get her to stop drawing countless times.
    â€œYou have to stop wrecking your pants,” she’d say. “We’re not made of money. It makes you look grubby to have all that scribbling on your thighs.”
    But Heidi couldn’t stop, especially after she’d discovered the wonder of the Pigma Micron during her freshman year. With it, she wasn’t just drawing. She was becoming the lines, dancing on whatever surface she’d chosen, drinking in the blackness of the ink until she was nothing but what she unspooled from her imagination. It was the only time she ever felt like her hands and mind and body and soul were all working together on the same thing.
    That year, she’d made a sketch a day, keeping them in a stack in the family room. One day while she was at school, the stack disappeared. She asked her mom, who was organizing the spice cabinet, if she’d seen it.
    â€œWhat, those sketches?” She clicked a jar of pepper and one of paprika down on the counter. “I recycled them. I’m sorry. We just have so much art from you, Heidi. You can’t save it all. And I have to say, I know you like your drawings, but it’s time to realize you don’t have time forthat anymore. Doodling is taking time away from the things you need to be doing, like thinking about where you want to go to college and what you want to do with your life. The art — it just isn’t practical.”
    â€œCome on.” Megan interrupted Heidi’s memory. “Just let me look.”
    Heidi slid the napkin toward her and took another bite of chili. She forgot to blow on it and scorched the roof of her mouth.
    â€œHey, not bad, but you forgot something crucial,” Megan said. She drew an extravagant handlebar mustache on Heidi’s portrait. “Did I ever tell you about my cousin?”
    â€œThe one who goes to Brown?”
    â€œNo. That cousin is pretty much a perfect specimen of humanity. He’s even hotter than Vincent Lionheart, and I would marry him if I lived in one of the twenty-five states where that sort of thing is legal. My other cousin. The one who sings on cruise ships.”
    Heidi smiled at the mention of Vincent Lionheart. She’d just bought Megan’s Christmas present, a limited-edition deluxe action figure of the movie vampire Megan had coveted ever since they saw him at Undead Con. He even had hand-painted facial features, a houndstooth blazer, and miniature lace-up wing tips.
    â€œI don’t think you’ve talked about that cousin.”
    She hasn’t. I’d remember that .
    â€œShe once messed up really bad at her high school talent show,” Megan said. “She and her best friend were doing their two-headed farm-girl act. They were inside a pair of giant overalls together —”
    If I was a farmer, I’d be an egg farmer because everyone there gets laid.
    Heidi shushed Jerome.
    â€œNo, it’s a good story,” Megan said. “I promise.”
    â€œNo, not you. I was … never mind.”
    â€œWere you having another one of your Earth-to-Heidi moments?” Megan said. “You have that look on your face again.”
    The look was slack-mouthed and vacant, like she’d just come back from getting a cavity filled. Heidi tried to tighten up her expression. “That doesn’t sound that embarrassing. Not like