Oh, Jolly. I’m trying hard not to sound melodramatic with you: I’m really working on getting something out of this, out of writing this down.

So maybe I’m from that first school after all.

But…naw.

Know what I think? I think Dad’s magnet is right. I think I need to stop the next time the house winks at me and I need to say: HELL YES, OKAY I AGREE

What do you think, Jolly?

I like it. Because it’s true that you can’t hear it coming, the thing that comes for you. Nobody hears the beginning of a bad thing. Only when it’s already here. So…what’s already on its way? And how far has it traveled? Does it sleep beneath the stars at night? Does it sleep beside you, waking just before you do so you never know it’s there? Or does the thing that comes not need any sleep at all? So that when YOU sleep, it catches up?

I have no idea if I can write once it’s here. I can barely speak. I mostly stand still and freeze up and wish it away.

The Coming Doom.

Panic Attackula.

Such dumb names for such serious things. That’s Natasha’s doing mostly. But I guess everything evil has a name.

Even the one I won’t write down.

But if I write it down…maybe then…

I can always cross it out later.

Ready, Jolly? I’m gonna see how the other school lives. I’m gonna believe that saying it makes it not real.

Ready? Here I go.

Oh…never mind.

I did write it. But I erased it.

And that’ll have to be that.

For now.

And hey, maybe that means I’m from both schools? Or just superstitious and nervous enough to hedge my bets.

Ugh.

Goodbye, Jolly.

For now.

Maybe this entry was all just a lesson for me. Just like that old woman across the aisle on the airplane.

Which reminds me for whatever reason of the unsane thunder we heard by the creek today. The sound of an airplane twisted into a corkscrew.

By giant hands.

And with that…

I HOPE I DON’T CRASH

Tammy Jones is rare, and she knows it. It’s not just that her hair is short, cropped to the skull; it’s that her hair is red. Cardinal red. The only one in her family with it, one of those recessive-gene things, though Tammy likes to think it has more to do with being touched by an angel just before she crawled out of her mother. And crawled she did, she believes, just as she believes she is personally responsible for everything she’s got so far in life, from her middle school grades to her handle. Yep. That last thing is a big deal to Tammy Jones and most of the people she hangs out with these days. Game recognizes game, Dad loves to say, especially after a good player or coach tells his daughter how impressed they are. Her handle was unrivaled in middle school (shit, the other girls couldn’t even use their left), and she’s discovered the same mostly holds true at the high school level. It’s only been summer league so far, true, but she’s heard the hot months are actually harder; ballers say the real stuff comes out in June, July, and August, when the players and coaches are looser with their games and girls like Tammy Jones have more freedom than they ever will in the rigid regular-season schedule. She can tell the older girls know how good she is. Just like she knows Coach Wanda didn’t play her as much as she should have because coaches have minute limits on the young ones. And even if you’re the best freshman-to-be to step foot in Samhattan High School in a decade, you still have to earn your keep.