Once he sat me on a shelf draped with black velvet and placed two giant wings behind me. He said they were turkey wings; I can’t imagine where he got them. Although they were mottled shades of autumn leaves, when photographed in black and white they were dark enough to be the limbs of giant ravens. I leaned back and raised my head, cocking it against one wing as though I were utterly exhausted, worn out from carrying all those dead souls back and forth from the underworld.

He pressed a button.

Click. I was in a contest. Then on the cover of a magazine. Then a calendar of my more endearing toddler poses, the less morbid ones that the unwashed masses might purchase as Christmas gifts for teenage girls or middle-aged housewives with nail polish that matched their kitchen curtains.

But the pictures of Lulu were the ones that made us both stars. Lulu is a goddess to more than just me, you see, and Dave’s pictures brought the world to attention. Suddenly, we were rich. We moved up to the mountain with the rest of the rich people, and I started school.

And I started seeing the dead women.

And I stabbed my counselor with his own dull knife.

And I ran away from his office, all the way home, where Lulu was waiting for me.

She was holding the door open with one hand and the telephone with her other. The phone’s pigtail-curled cord barely stretched from the kitchen, where the machine was mounted on the wall. She’d already gotten the call from the principal.

She stepped aside and let me run past her. I was panting and gasping for air, unable to dash another yard but unwilling to quit trying. In the living room, I did laps around the coffee table while she closed the door and placed the phone back on the receiver. She joined me by standing in the way of my loop, forcing me to stop or run into her.

She did not raise her voice.

“What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Why’d you hurt Mr. Schumann’s hand?”

I shivered and shook, though it was warm where I stood, in the patch of sun cast through the huge picture windows. “It was moving. And he wasn’t—it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his hand. It wasn’t his hand I wanted to stick!” I hollered. “It wasn’t his hand I saw! It was a different one. A little wrinkly one. The one in the book.”

Her eyebrows perked. “What book?”

“The book I saw. It was old, with old pages all yellow and dusty. And when it fell open, there was the hand stuck to the back cover. It was moving.”

“Moving, huh?”