"I don't want to think about night right now."

I met Luna by the pond like she'd asked me to. She was by the willow tree, which didn't surprise me; I'd expected her to be there.

"Hey," I said. "You slept kinda late."

Luna nodded. She had faint dark circles under her eyes.

"You okay?"

"Fine," she said, not looking at me.

"Want to go do something?"

"Like what?"

I thought. "Uh... we could go downtown, take a walk. It's a nice day. Or we could watch something. Or just hang out and talk. Whatever you wanna do."

"Let's take a walk," Luna decided, then immediately started off without waiting for a response from me.

I followed her. It took me a second to realize she was leading me over towards the ruins of her old house again.

"Any reason we're going over there?"

"I want to look at it," Luna said without turning around. She was walking so fast she was practically running. I broke into a half-jog to catch up with her.

We reached the ruins. The scene felt eerily familiar; again, Luna went to stand where the front door must have been once, staring as if in a trance. Her head was tilted up towards the sky, and for a second it occurred to me that maybe she was looking up at where the roof of the house would have been before it burned down. The way she was staring made my skin crawl; it looked almost as if she could see the house there, like it had never burned down at all.

"Have you done enough looking?" I asked after a few minutes of this.

At the sound of my voice, Luna blinked several times, then shook her head rapidly from side to side, her hair flying out around her. It wasn't a headshake meaning "no"; she looked as if she were trying to snap herself out of the trance she'd apparently fallen into.

"I'm sorry," she told me. "I just... I just needed to..."

She blinked rapidly again. I wondered if she was going to cry, but she didn't.

"Look," I said, trying to break the tension, "it can't have been easy having your old house burn down like that. I get it."

Luna shook her head slowly. "No, you don't. It's not..." She took a deep breath. "It's fine. It doesn't really matter. Come on, let's go downtown."

Again, she led and I followed.

We didn't talk on the way to Main Street, but once we'd gotten there conversation resumed as normal. Neither of us talked about the earlier incident; it was as if it had never happened. We walked around, got cold drinks, chatted. It was a very nice day, so we sat out in the sun for a while not talking much at all, just enjoying the weather.

Luna asked me if I'd been writing down my dreams. I told her I had, and she asked me what they'd been about. I told her the one I could remember, about the beach house. She seemed interested.

"Your dreams sound pretty nice," she told me.

"I don't know about nice. It was kind of a weird dream."

"But nothing bad happened in it. Right?"

"The absence of bad things isn't the same as nice," I pointed out.

Luna shrugged. "I guess."

"Do you have a lot of nightmares or something?" I asked her. The dreams Luna had related to me in the past mostly sounded innocuous.

Luna hesitated. "Sometimes," she said carefully. "But I don't want to talk about that right now. It's a nice day. I don't want to think about night right now."

I don't want to think about night right now. That line stuck with me. It seems like such odd phrasing.

Eventually we both headed back to Luna's house. She invited me to stay for lunch, but I didn't feel in the mood, so I took my bike and went home.