Amanda and I turned out to be good friends after that day. She lived only a couple of kilometers from my house, and both of us had bicycles. We talked a lot about The Other, and what we had seen.

"I went the first time from the hospital," she explained. "I was outside my house when two guys rode by on bikes and shot up my neighborhood. I was stupid, and I got hit. I was thirteen. I totally panicked, but not nearly as much as my mom did. My dad was at work, and when he got to the hospital, I thought he was gonna kill someone, he was so pissed. I only got shot in the stomach,just once, but it really hurt, bad. I was laying in this big room on a stretcher, and all these people were screaming, bleeding all over the place. They made my parents leave to go fill out paperwork and get the blood test I.D., so I was left alone. I was so scared, and bawling my head off. I thought I was gonna be okay, till the guy next to me just threw up this big stream of blood on the floor. I started screaming, wishing it would just end, and all of a sudden it got totally quiet, except for me still screaming. That's when I realized I had gone. I totally freaked then, and started praying like a little kid, and came right back. I think it was thinking so hard about what happened that made me not completely lose my mind."

"Freaky," I said, after a pause to let this all sink in. "When I first went, I couldn't get back for days." I explained to her about my first time to The Other, the day with the football. She told me she thought my first time was scarier than hers, but I told her I didn't think so. I was lucky, I'd never been shot. I've been to see plenty of people in the hospital, lots of kids, after they'd been hit, but I've only had a couple of close calls.

"I don't know about the name The Other,'" she told me. "It sounds all mystical, even though it's just something we discovered, nothing more."

"It is mystical, though," I countered, "It's like we have these magical powers that let us do things other people can't. It lets us survive."

"Yeah, I guess so. Hell, it let's us have stuff that we normally wouldn't have," Amanda laughed, pointing to her new interactive viewer. Amanda stole a lot more than I did. It didn't bother me at all.

We went down to the arena, like we did a lot of days. Amanda had been getting horrific headaches after coming back from The Other, lately, and she was afraid to wish for it, she thought her brain would explode if she did. On a whim, I took her hand, and wished extra hard for The Other. Sure enough, she came with me, even though she didn't wish at all. I hoped I wouldn't get the headaches too, or we'd never be able to go. She said her pain went away as soon as we got there. I was afraid that someday Amanda wouldn't want to come back, or that someday she wouldn't be able to come back.

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