I’m still a freak. I’m still a loser with no friends. Even if I have a pretty okay stepdad, all of that shit is still true. I’m terrified of college. What if everybody hates me there as much as they hate me here? I haven’t had any visions of college, thank god. But what if that means I’ll die before I go to college? What if that means I don’t have any future at all?

I get going like that, and it’s almost too much. It’s like I’m falling down a well and there’s no bottom, and if I don’t reach out and grab the rope with the bucket on it, I’m just going to tumble forever. Sometimes I hate my visions and I hate my brain and I hate all of it so much I want to gouge my own eyes out. But then I’m afraid that I’d have the visions all the time, just in my mind, and there wouldn’t be any reality left to distract me. I barely even know what to do with myself. I miss Mom, and I miss Grandma, and I miss Cass, and I miss our old life before Horace, before the Farm, before all of it.

But I haven’t even told you the worst part. I haven’t told anyone. You have to promise you won’t tell anyone either.

Sometimes, late at night, when everyone in the house is asleep but me, I think about the Farm. I think about the vision I had where I was the leader of everybody, where I was famous and rich and happy, where Cass loved me, where I maybe married her and had a bunch of kids, where I spoke at every Gathering and everyone thought I was the greatest, where I had the voice of a prophet, where every vision I had was received by a multitude as a miracle, a gift straight from God, or something like God.

And just for a moment, I wish it had all happened that way.

I wish Murphy had run out on me, just taken Horace and bailed and not stopped to get me too. I wish she’d grabbed him and the Trans Am and hightailed it to brighter pastures, never giving a thought to me again. I wish I had been left the leader of a congregation, the prophet of the Farm, on TV every weekend, broadcast worldwide, streamed a million times on the internet.