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usually see in a neighborhood, all of them full and vibrantly green.
    I blinked against the sunlight. “Where are we?”
    “Exactly where we were before, mate,” Simon said. “Weird,
huh?”
    “Do you like it?” Naomi asked. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
    I heard kids playing in the distance and the sound of
dogs barking in backyards. Cars rolled past on the next block, music blaring to
the afternoon. Was it my imagination or did I smell brownies baking?
    “Sure, this seems nice,” I said. “Still not sure where we
are, though.”
    “This is our neighborhood,” Jamie said. “The one we
agreed upon. It’s kind of a mix of different stuff, based on where we all last
lived.”
    “We even snuck a bit of England in there,” Simon said
proudly. “The Victorian flats were my idea.”
    At first, I wasn’t sure what Simon was talking about. The
side of the street we faced was lined with the kind of houses you’d find in the
suburbs pretty much anywhere. But when I turned around, I saw that the other
side showed a row of apartment buildings. Not the bland rectangles with windows
and balconies I usually thought about when I pictured apartments, but more
ornate, almost historic looking. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I saw that
there were also palm trees looming above the oaks and maples. I wondered what
had happened to the gray, drizzling sky and the forest we’d left when we’d gone
to my funeral.
    Naomi somehow guessed what I was thinking. “Your place
isn’t really gone,” she said. “I mean, you can still go there if you want to.
It’s just not infested right now. No, that’s not it.” She turned to Jamie.
“What’s the word Martha uses?”
    “Manifesting,” Jamie said. “It’s kind of what I was
getting at before. I know it seems weird, but you sort of created that around
yourself. Was it someplace you used to know?”
    I had no idea what they were talking about with the whole
“manifesting” thing. Like I could somehow create my own personal rain forest.
Could I? Obviously, this whole deal was going to take some getting used to. I
shook my head. “Not exactly,” I said. “More like someplace I’d planned on
seeing. In the Northwest.”
    Jamie nodded. “Sure, that’s cool too. Either way, since
it’s the place you came in with we decided to go with it for a while. Hope it
helped, but it was kind of getting us down.”
    When he said that, I remembered that I’d slept for almost
a week. I was still trying to make sense of that, but it sounded like I’d
somehow left them surrounded in gloom the whole time. No wonder they were sick
of it.
    I looked around again at the neighborhood. “Who lives in
all these houses?”
    “Depends,” Jamie said. “There’s also an awesome skate
park down the street. We’ll have to break out the boards soon.”
    An actual skate park? That did sound cool. In the past,
I’d only skated on the streets of my neighborhood and a few times in some
parking lots. For a second, I wondered about pads and helmets but then
remembered we couldn’t possibly get hurt. Or could we? I wasn’t really sure.
    “Ready to see our house?” Naomi said. “It’s pretty
nifty.”
    I looked from one side of the street to the other. “Sure,
which one is it?”
    “That’s it, there,” Simon said, pointing toward one of
the Victorian apartment buildings behind me.
    I turned to see a three-story building, painted in
different shades of blue, ranging from turquoise at the bottom to nearly purple
at the top, with white trim and green shutters. The place had a huge veranda
with hanging plants, dining tables and Adirondack chairs that looked pretty
comfy for lounging or maybe reading. Judging from the outside, definitely a
nice place to live.
    “We call it Halfway House,” Naomi said. “I think you’ll
really like it.”
    Halfway house? Confused, I looked at Jamie.
    “Oh, that’s kind of a joke,” Jamie said. “Not that we
have substance issues or anything like