But they can’t. Not them. I know them. I know everything I need to know.

It’s been a long night. My arms ache. My hands are sore. But the scratches and scrapes, the one bad slash under my eye, have already healed. It’s the delicate little ones like Frankie who sometimes put up the toughest fight.

I circle the sagging shed, again and again, dead leaves flying, scattering drops of river water from one of Aunt Mae’s empty bottles. The ring of stones gleams.

Very faintly, through the layers of walls and soil, I can still hear her screaming. But she’s getting tired. She’s hoarse. She’ll stop soon.

And no one else will hear even this wisp of sound.

No one can get close.

No one will find her.

Anders

Big things start small. That’s how they get in.

You make one little choice. You choose to take guitar lessons. You choose not to quit the lessons, even though you suck so bad that at first you’ll only practice shut inside your bedroom closet, where no one else can hear. Every day you make the choice to practice instead of going off with your crappy bike or your skateboard or your computer games like the other kids. You choose to put on that same metal album eight hundred times. You choose to learn every solo. You start hanging out with other guys who like the same kind of music you do, other guys with instruments that they actually practice, too, and then one day you choose a name for your band.

After a couple of years, you choose to play in public for the first time. You do it again. And again. You choose working and pushing and failing and writing and playing again until you’re actually good and you’d do anything, anything, to be even better. And then you start to get famous, and everybody around you knows who you are, and then one night you do something idiotic in front of a giant crowd of people who all know your name, and just like that, all at once, your whole life starts to disappear.

Your whole life.

All those tiny, stupid choices turn into one huge, godforsaken mess, and when you look back at it, you can’t even see where things started to go wrong. But you know it was your fault. Because you did it. All those little, gigantic things. Every single step of the way.

That’s how it started at the Crow’s Nest: Small. Embarrassingly, pathetically small. We played a local talent night. I think there were five people in the audience, not counting the other musicians who’d come to play. And there we were, me and Jezz and Patrick, scrawny sixteen-year-olds with crappy amateur instruments and a name—Last Things—that we’d finally decided on after fighting over it for weeks. We played an Opeth cover, pretty badly, and one song that Patrick and I had cowritten that was called “Apocalypse,” which truly sucked, and some decent Deftones. We were just decent enough that Ike Lawrence asked us to play again for the next local talent night.