The same thing happened to Robbie. People dumped praise on him for insignificant achievements until he got drunk on it. Gee, he carried a brown ball over an arbitrary line of paint?! You should see this scrapbook Robbie has. It’s loaded with articles drooling over how astounding he was. Where’s all those reporters now? Slobbering all over some new boy carrying a new ball, that’s where.

Letting Robbie believe he was somebody ruined his life. I won’t let it ruin mine. My scrapbook’s like a tick about to pop. It’s three times the size of Robbie’s, which means it’s three times as hazardous. Lotte, let’s not forget your scrapbook was a big juicy tick too before Mama mysteriously “misplaced it,” and hmmm, how did life work out for you, ha ha ha?

One day Jody wondered if his mom kept a scrapbook of him, and I asked if he’d ever done anything worth putting in a book. He looked sad, but really he should be proud. Realizing your “accomplishments” are fake is what growing up feels like. The pitiful thing is most people never realize it. The only non-fake thing you ever did, Lotte, the only thing you ever did for you, was try to kill yourself. You did a crummy job of it, but I respect you gave it the old college try.

I’m not going to pussy out like you did. They’re going to need a lot more than one stomach pump to fix what we’re going to do. Remember in my first letter I said I didn’t have any dark secrets? I sure do now. Robbie had an idea that’s going to educate this town on how you don’t mess up kids and expect they won’t mess you up back. I think Robbie was joking when he came up with it, but it felt like my skin caught on fire. He’d have dropped it, but I kept bringing it back up. I encouraged him, complimented him. Pretty soon it wasn’t a joke, and best of all, Robbie believed he’d planned the whole thing himself without any help from anyone, which, as you know, is critical when you’re dealing with males.

What would you think if you looked down your sweet little sister’s throat and all you saw were miles of rusty pipe? Is that a strange thing to ask? I have thoughts like this all the time and never tell anyone, not even Jody. My heart is a crow with oily black feathers. Does it take a crazy person like you to make sense of a crazy thing like that? My eyeballs are filled with dog fangs. Did your eyes ever feel like they could bite?