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green. “I worked hard to earn those two extra scoops.”
    “You mean your
scoops
worked hard to earn them,” Nate retorted, with a meaningful nod at Olivia’s low-cut shirt.
    She made a halfhearted attempt to slap him as he nudged one of the ice cream mounds over toward my part of the plate. It skidded toward me and avoided flying into my lap only by lodging itself against a half-eaten chocolate cable car at the edge of the dish.
    “Come on, birthday girl,” Nate said. “One for you and one for me.”
    He held his spoon up. I reluctantly raised my own, clinked it once against his, and fell upon the extra scoop I really had no business trying to fit inside of my already cramping stomach.
    When we were finally finished, Nate wiped his mouth and, without standing up, bowed dramatically to our audience.
    “Show’s over, folks,” he said.
    A group of tourists wearing identical purple shirts gave him a disgusted look.
    “Present time!” Olivia announced, pulling a carrier bag out from under her coat, where she had been hiding it. The bag was a distinctive shade of pink, which meant it could only have come from Jest Jewels, a store Olivia and I were obsessed with, and that Nate loathed. “It’s from both of us.”
    Inside, wrapped in pink tissue paper, was a beautiful leather-bound journal. I grinned over at Nate; I had about a dozen journals at home, which I’d been systematically filling since the age of nine, and I was just about to run out of space in my latest one. Only Nate could possibly have known that. It must have been his idea.
    “The book’s not even the good part,” Olivia insisted. “Check out what’s inside.”
    I opened the journal to the page marked by a silver chain. On the end of the chain, pressed between the blank pages, was a silver horseshoe charm.
    Olivia grabbed it and put the chain around my neck immediately. It was just long enough so when I looked down, I could just see the tiny, perfect charm. “It made me think of you,” she explained.
    “Thank you. I love them both,” I tapped the pink label stuck to the back of the journal and cocked an eyebrow at Nate. “I can’t
believe
you went inside Jest Jewels.”
    “I dragged him,” Olivia said proudly, as Nate groaned.
    “Everything in there is so . . . pink,” he complained.
    Olivia tweaked his nose. “Don’t worry, Princess, we won’t shop there for your birthday.”
    I had a bit of a brain freeze as we rolled ourselves outside. I breathed in the cool night air, much colder here than in Marin because of the breeze coming off of the bay, and closed my eyes, trying to fight back the sugar rush that was rapidly taking over my brain.
    When I opened my eyes again, my stomach flopped over itself and an odd, hollow, rushing sound filled my ears. I stared, unbelievably, at the scene before me.
    The red and white walls of Ghirardelli Square, the sign, and the clock tower were gone. In their place, surrounding us on all sides, were blindingly bright walls of silver. When I shielded my eyes from the glare and looked again, I saw that the “walls” were really just strands of tiny metallic strips that had been woven together. The walls were swaying like curtains in the light breeze from the nearby bay, and yet somehow I still got the impression they were more solid than steel. There was something oppressive, almost fortresslike about those walls—but whether they were keeping us trapped inside or protecting us from something outside, I couldn’t tell.
    I was totally unable to look away, but the brightness made my eyes start to ache. I closed them briefly, and the reverberating, metallic glow made strange shadows behind my eyelids until I opened them again. Unlike my hallucinations from earlier in the day, the strange fortress of light did not disappear or run away. It stayed where it was. Bright, solid, and as real to me as the rushing sound inside of my ears.
    I looked over at Olivia and Nate; they were watching me