A few more leaves float down to the grass. I bite my lip.

“Also, I started school today, and it was awful. There’s this girl there. She was really rude to me, so I wrote a mean poem about her, and she saw it. She’ll probably tell everyone, and now they’ll think I’m the mean one.”

Boomer spots another squirrel and goes bounding off, but I stay where I am, trying to picture Gram next to me, trying to hear what she would tell me to do.

Instead, I see us at the village fair when I was seven.

Gram had abandoned her parasol to the side of the tent and was dancing with Old Joe, her long dress skimming the grass as she spun on bare feet. Nearby, Ruth led Professor Swann in a waltz, and he kept looking over at Gram like she might be able to rescue him.

I was sitting under the dessert table, nibbling at an oatmeal raisin cookie and wiggling a loose tooth with my tongue, when two boys walked up.

“That pale lady dresses funny,” said one boy.

“That’s because she’s a witch,” the older one said knowingly.

“Is not.”

“Is too. Just like the ones in the stories who do spells and have cauldrons and warts and eat little kids for breakfast.”

Fuming, I reached out and pinched the boy who had just spoken, hard on his leg.

“Ow!” he howled as I darted away, ducking under the back of the tablecloth, so that when he raised it to look under the table, there was no one there.

“It was her, it was her!” the younger boy yelped. “The witch put a . . . a . . . a curse on you!”

That night, I couldn’t sleep, and when I came downstairs, Gram was there, already putting a slice of apple pie on a plate for me.

“What’s keeping you awake tonight, darlin’?”

I repeated what I’d heard the boys say.

“And did that bother you?” she asked. She sat across from me in her white nightgown, her hair in a long silver braid, the way she always wore it to sleep.

“The parts about you eating little kids and having warts,” I said. “Not the part about being a witch. I wouldn’t mind if you were a witch.”

It was kind of witchy, the way she always knew when I couldn’t sleep. And she had said that she might have some magic in her blood.

“Well, that is certainly comforting,” she replied.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Gram? That those kids think that stuff?”

“Goodness, no,” she said. “If I spent my life being bothered by what other people thought of me, I’d never get anything else done, would I? Besides, there’s no point in worrying about things you can’t change, and you can’t change what people think of you.”

“Why not?” I asked.