I know what you’re thinking. Everyone has weird dreams when they’re a kid.

You’d be right.

And I remember some of my other weird childhood dreams—Dr. Seuss forests, Olympic tennis matches, hitchhiking with George Bush. That’s why I know this one was different. There wasn’t that grogginess draped over everything. I was there. It was the start of something.

Granted, I didn’t understand it at the time. It wasn’t even scary enough to tell my dad about the next morning. But those three faces stuck with me.

Their big pupils and their brown eyes.

Their tight-lipped mouths and their sharp jawlines.

They haunted me in the literal sense, showing up in people I saw at school, on TV, when I went out with my mother. I told her about it a few days after it happened. Well, less told her about it than I asked her if people could look like that. Or, well, less asked her about it than I tried drawing the face of the one who kissed me and then I showed her the picture. She didn’t understand. She just smiled and said what a great thing it is to draw.

“People come in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “They can look like anything!”

She was always so sweet to me. Her kindness was comforting enough to make me not worry about it much, but I couldn’t shake the image of them.

Their high cheekbones and their smooth heads.

Their long faces and their longer bodies.

So I took the drawing to school. I had the same art teacher all of elementary school, Mrs. Miles. She told us to bring things to class that we’d drawn at home. I naively thought this would be my chance to confirm what I’d seen.

Needless to say, colored pencils didn’t do my vision justice. Mrs. Miles made a condescending show of applauding my ‘active imagination’ while some of my classmates twisted their faces and pulled back their eyelids to imitate my creature. I saw the other government kids giggling while I was in front of the class.

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I probably would’ve dropped it there if Jackie didn’t come up to me afterwards. Jackie was a Hopi girl, one of the many Native Americans in my elementary. I think her mom worked with my dad, but I was too young to understand much of that.

She tugged on the tangled keychains dangling from my monogrammed backpack. When I whirled around, I expected the sneering giggles of another government kid—one of the sons or daughters of the white diplomats sent to Flagstaff to ‘liaison’ with the ‘indigenous populations,’ mostly Navajo and Hopi. These kids seemed to overcompensate for living with Native Americans and Mexicans by double dipping in Americana. They wore their baseball caps, Superman shirts, and neon Nikes like talismans to ward away the evil spirits of culture. It was a bit ridiculous in the most excessively strip-malled, suburbed, franchised town in America.

So seeing Jackie’s sweet, round face, I was surprised.

“I’ve seen people like that,” she said. “I’ve seen them in my dreams, in the stars.”

“That’s where I saw them too,” I said.

“Did one of them kiss you?” she asked.

“Yes!”

I was happier than I can ever remember.

We barely talked before then, but after that day, we were inseparable. It was like we were long-lost siblings. I couldn’t believe it. That first day we spent hours talking and talking—not just about those strange people.

“My daddy always told me to trust my dreams,” she said. “He said they’re the only place you can’t lie to yourself. That’s how he knew he would marry my mommy and when we’d all be born.”

She told me about family superstitions, her fear of the dark, where she came from, how she liked to play in the dirt with her older brother. It all sounded so fascinating. She would visit relatives on the reservation almost every week. That’s where she said she had the dream. It happened almost the same way as me.

She was staying in a motel on the way back from one of the villages on the third mesa. She told me she crammed into two double beds with her parents and her brother. With the others snoring, the creaky floors, the water heaters, and the trucks blazing by in the dead of night, she was scared so bad she couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually her brother Michael noticed. He was the protective type, so he told her to follow him outside. They snuck out under their parents’ noses and went around behind the parking lot dumpsters to a short plateau looking across a brushy flat. That’s where she saw the same perfect, blinding pattern of stars.

I wonder if it was the same day—if the star people brough both of us to them to see who would react better, like some kind of audition. Maybe they took more than just us. Maybe they took people from all over the world.

“I don’t remember them saying anything to me,” she told me. “All I remember is that kiss.”