“You really think that’s going to work?” he scoffed. “You think I would jump off a cliff if you dared me to?”

“It’s not a cliff,” she said. “It’s just a street. All you have to do is walk down it. And I got you to eat a frog on a dare that one time, so yeah, I think it’ll work. You’re not scared, are you?”

Scared of a plain gravel lane on the edge of town, with thistle growing in its ditches and dandelions down the centre of it? “Of course not,” he said. “But they’ve got to say those things about it for a reason, don’t they?”

“Do they?” she countered. “People say all sorts of things. It looks like just a street to me. What, do you think it actually makes time go backwards? That’s just what they tell kids so they don’t wander out of town. Even my little brother doesn’t believe it anymore.”

“I’ve never seen a grown-up walking on it either,” he grumbled.

“That’s because it doesn’t go anywhere. And grown-ups don’t wander at all. Look, if it was true, it would be on the news. There would be scientists here looking at it. And tourists! It’s just us, which means it’s just a street going into a field.”

It looked like just that, like a lane that might have led somewhere once, trailing away now into nothing but long grass and wind. The gravel on it, speckled with white stones and worked down into juddery ridges here and there by rain, was the same as all the lanes around town that did lead somewhere. Kids could have wandered down any of those and gotten lost, so why were there only stories about this one?

“Why don’t you walk down it, then?” he challenged her.

“I will, if you won’t,” she said. “And I’ll tell everyone at school you let a girl go first because you were too scared.”

“That’s not fair,” he protested. “I’m not-”

“Why not? It’ll be true. Or you can go first and we can tell all of them the stories aren’t true after all. It’s up to you.”

If he could have made time go backwards just a little, he would have said he was busy when she’d come to his door. He would have stayed in with his games and watched the wind pick up through the window, blowing into the storm his dad said was coming later. Instead, he was standing out there with the wind turning cold on his bare arms, hadn’t even brought a jacket, and she would tell all of them if he didn’t do it. Probably even tell them he’d cried and begged her to go first – for a friend, she could be nasty if she didn’t get her way.

“Fine,” he said. And if he did do it, maybe she wouldn’t tell them how his voice hiccuped a little saying it, pushed up his throat by his heart pumping faster. “I’ll go first.”

“Then go for it,” she said, stepping in behind him. He wouldn’t tell them she had been too scared to go first, of course. If he had been that nasty about not getting his way, they wouldn’t have been friends at all. “I don’t want to be out here when it starts raining.”

They could both have been warm and safe inside if she hadn’t gotten that stupid idea in her head. But they wouldn’t have been friends if he’d said that sort of thing, either. He set his feet where cracked pavement ran out into ridged, speckled gravel, where the dandelions danced and thistles seemed to grab at the lane’s edges, thorny and wild with wind.

Just gravel and grass. Just a story. He pulled in a deep breath, one that smelled like rain coming, and stepped out onto the lane.